I've been looking around for origins on this song (the Pink Pajamas parody of Battle Hymn of the Republic) and have been surprised to find absolutely nothing, considering it must be a fairly recent (within the last hundred years or so) song. Seems to be very common in boy scout camps and the like. Does anyone have any information on where it might have come from?

It certainly seems like a scouting song, doesn't it? And, indeed, the traditional mentions mostly come from camps (see Patricia Averill's Camp Songs, Folk Songs, which cites it three times.

And yet, it's not in that incredible source of silly camp songs, Harbin's Parodology, and it's very rare in camp songbooks, presumably because it's considered a little risque. I found it in a Boy Scout songbook from 1997, but not in any of the many early scouting books I checked.

And Alice Kane claimed to have learned it in Belfast around the First World War. That's not absolute proof -- she was recalling her songs more than half a century later. Her memory was very good, but that isn't the same as being demonstrably perfect.

Still, best bet is that the song was in existence in Ulster by the 1920s, but somehow ended up sung in American camps. Which I agree is strange.